School apologizes over pro-Nazi essay assignment

[Razgovory]

Well thankfully Albany disagrees with you.    

Exactly.  We wouldn't want students to learn critical thinking skills in public schools; thankfully, most public school systems are as bureaucratic as Albany's so I will always have parents willing to pay me to do so in a private school, where we don't have nearly as much of the bureaucratic bullshit.

You win and I win when the American education system fails its students.

I suspect they will not pay to teach that particular exercise.

[garbon]

You win and I win when the American education system fails its students.

I think we all win when our students avoid such a poorly designed critical thinking assignment.  Was this a companion follow-up to reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and assignment on using passages that were cited from the Bible to state how black people deserve to / should be slaves?

[Camerus]

I can tell that you don't teach.  If one wants to teach critical thinking skills, then one doesn't assign "book report" assignments like you suggest.  Students learn a little bit when writing descriptive essays like you suggest, but not much. 

I think the teacher obviously overestimated the maturity and professionalism of his bosses in the bureaucracy, but that's a risk every public school teacher faces (and the reason I left public school teaching).  I don't think he is a moron, I think he is somebody who doesn't think as bureaucratically as most people on the forum here, and thus is poorly suited to teach in a bureaucratic environment.

Considering how you think this is a great assignment, I am pretty relieved to hear that you can "tell I can't teach."   

[DontSayBanana]

I can tell that you don't teach.  If one wants to teach critical thinking skills, then one doesn't assign "book report" assignments like you suggest.  Students learn a little bit when writing descriptive essays like you suggest, but not much. 

Says the guy who's "clarified" his assertion that the assignment should be challenging students to regurgitate the propaganda and not realistically think like an actual party member.  I've got a kettle I'd like you to meet, sir.

[Agelastus]

You win and I win when the American education system fails its students.

I think we all win when our students avoid such a poorly designed critical thinking assignment.  Was this a companion follow-up to reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and assignment on using passages that were cited from the Bible to state how black people deserve to / should be slaves?

It's a perfectly valid exercise assuming the class is mature enough to handle it and in that respect I'm not going to second guess the teacher on the spot.

I remember having to do similar exercises myself; in one case it was taking a position opposite to your normal opinion and then making a speech to your classmates on the issue to try and convince others of the validity of your position (even though, of course, you personally didn't believe in it.)

Inherently as described it was a decent exercise in critical thinking; of course, if I was the teacher the next assignment would have been an assignment to deconstruct and demolish the arguments made by the student in the previous assignment. I wonder what this teacher's next assignment would have been absent this hysteria?

Would people have been this enraged if the class had been asked to take the part of a good Stalinist during the purges? Or, for another example, a good Maoist?


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Incidentally the OP says it was an English Teacher setting the assignment - it wasn't a history class assignment as a couple of people around here seem to have concluded by the tone of their posts.

[DontSayBanana]

It's a perfectly valid exercise assuming the class is mature enough to handle it and in that respect I'm not going to second guess the teacher on the spot.

It depends on the context, but probably not.  Arguing the Nazi party platform is just regurgitating an ideology, which by definition, discourages critical thinking.  Arguing the viewpoint of a hypothetical Nazi could, however, touch on intersecting agendas and encourages the student to choose whether the speaker is following lock-step or going that way to further their own agenda.

[garbon]

It's a perfectly valid exercise assuming the class is mature enough to handle it and in that respect I'm not going to second guess the teacher on the spot.

I remember having to do similar exercises myself; in one case it was taking a position opposite to your normal opinion and then making a speech to your classmates on the issue to try and convince others of the validity of your position (even though, of course, you personally didn't believe in it.)

Inherently as described it was a decent exercise in critical thinking; of course, if I was the teacher the next assignment would have been an assignment to deconstruct and demolish the arguments made by the student in the previous assignment. I wonder what this teacher's next assignment would have been absent this hysteria?

Would people have been this enraged if the class had been asked to take the part of a good Stalinist during the purges? Or, for another example, a good Maoist?

I think there's little to be gained in asking students to defend racism.

[CountDeMoney]

I think there's little to be gained in asking students to defend racism.

Pfft, what do you know about asking students to defend racism.  You're gay and black, and probably don't even have a teaching license.

[garbon]

I think there's little to be gained in asking students to defend racism.

Pfft, what do you know about asking students to defend racism.  You're gay and black, and probably don't even have a teaching license.

It's true. I've never had the advantage of developing the critical thinking skills that you get from defending racist arguments.

[HVC]

I think there's little to be gained in asking students to defend racism.

Pfft, what do you know about asking students to defend racism.  You're gay and black, and probably don't even have a teaching license.

It's true. I've never had the advantage of developing the critical thinking skills that you get from defending racist arguments.

well you are a republican

[Malthus]

It's a perfectly valid exercise assuming the class is mature enough to handle it and in that respect I'm not going to second guess the teacher on the spot.

I remember having to do similar exercises myself; in one case it was taking a position opposite to your normal opinion and then making a speech to your classmates on the issue to try and convince others of the validity of your position (even though, of course, you personally didn't believe in it.)

Inherently as described it was a decent exercise in critical thinking; of course, if I was the teacher the next assignment would have been an assignment to deconstruct and demolish the arguments made by the student in the previous assignment. I wonder what this teacher's next assignment would have been absent this hysteria?

Would people have been this enraged if the class had been asked to take the part of a good Stalinist during the purges? Or, for another example, a good Maoist?

I think there's little to be gained in asking students to defend racism.

Sure there is.

To my mind, racism (and more generally, bigotry) is an enemy of civil society - or at least, more correctly, an attitude that leads to the creation of enemies of civil society.

The old saying is that, if you wish to defeat an enemy, you must understand them.

The point of an exercise like this is not specific to the Nazis and Jews. Rather, they stand as simply an example (albeit an extreme one) of how shabby ideological thinking, unexamined and unchallenged, relying on emotion and prejudice rather than logic or fact, in an atmosphere of chrisis, hysteria and false patriotism,  can lead to horrific public consequences.

Nothing could better insulate children from being victimised in turn by such a process than being asked to think through how to manipulate the levers of rhetoric themselves, based on a historical example.

The fear is not that the kids are ever likely to want to recreate Nazism and its rage against te Jews - lets face it, that is about as likely in America as the kids wanting to recreate Tsarist Russia. Rather, the the notion is to understand how rhetoric and propaganda work generally to justify what is on its face unjustifiable.

[Malthus]

Grumber- Would you mind writing an essay that Jews are evil and the source of our problems? I ask because I'm pretty sure the Nazis never came up with a consistent reason why, they just expected everyone to believe and shot everyone who didn't.

In order to understand Nazi thinking, you have to understand scientific racism and social Darwinism. The Nazis positioned themselves not as random lunatics, but as the wave of the future - based on what they claimed was the best, most modern science of the day; though of course as we know, riddled with bullshit.

You see echoes of this bullshit to this day.

The notion is that:

(a) races of humans are distinct and their distinctness can be measured (this from anthropology);

(b) some races of humans are provably better that others - more intelligent, more creative (many anthropologists believed this to be true);

(c) the "survival of the fittest" applies to races as it does to species - the "unfit" are doomed to die out (and in fact deserve to do so), as

(d) science has replaced the old morality - survival of the fit is not only a description, it is a moral goal (not only Nazis believed this);

(e) a thinking person, belonging to a particular race, would naturally want his or her race to prosper at the expense of all others - struggle what science states is the state of nature, of reality itself (many non-Nazis believed that struggle was both inevitable and a positive good - see Marx);

(f) the basis of morality should be science, and the scientific morality pointed to treating humans as one would treat any other type of livestock - to attempt through eugenics and culling, to make the race better - to fail to do this is actively immoral (again, eugenics);

(g) that Jews, a distinct race, can "ape" non-Jews and even interbreed with them, thus infecting them with their inferior genetic material, which acts to degrade the race;

(h) the Jews have always known and acted on the theory of the struggle of the races (though not presumably with such scientific rigour)  - they are attempting to be "the fittest" by infecting non-Jewish society and culture, deliberately spreading degrading and immoral art and philosophy for the specific purpose of undermining competing "races" such as the Germans;

and therefore (i) any measures taken to remove the Jews and their influence are moral (and, in fact, defensive);

(j) such measures require harshness which democracies are incapable of - which is why one needs, for the good of the race, a supreme leader invested with unlimited powers.

[Malthus]

The Nazis are a terrible example to use for this kind of exercise.  Their ideology was notoriously shoddy in terms of logical thinking. Same is really true for any racist ideology - the argument depend on assuming obviously false premises and thus there is little value in such an exercise.

A better example would be something like Aristotle's theory of natural slavery (which also has the "virtue" of not being explicitly racialist).  Or Filmer's patriacha.  And yes I understand that this is ostensibly part of unit on modern history but the assignment doesn't seem particularly well designed to teaching the actual history either.

If the purpose of the exercise was to use the Nazis as an example of rigourously logical thinking, I would agree.

[garbon]

Sure there is.

To my mind, racism (and more generally, bigotry) is an enemy of civil society - or at least, more correctly, an attitude that leads to the creation of enemies of civil society.

The old saying is that, if you wish to defeat an enemy, you must understand them.

The point of an exercise like this is not specific to the Nazis and Jews. Rather, they stand as simply an example (albeit an extreme one) of how shabby ideological thinking, unexamined and unchallenged, relying on emotion and prejudice rather than logic or fact, in an atmosphere of chrisis, hysteria and false patriotism,  can lead to horrific public consequences.

Nothing could better insulate children from being victimised in turn by such a process than being asked to think through how to manipulate the levers of rhetoric themselves, based on a historical example.

The fear is not that the kids are ever likely to want to recreate Nazism and its rage against te Jews - lets face it, that is about as likely in America as the kids wanting to recreate Tsarist Russia. Rather, the the notion is to understand how rhetoric and propaganda work generally to justify what is on its face unjustifiable.

And again I think you can do this without asking children to defend racism.

I stated it before but now I'll ask it - did most of Languish have to complete a similar assignment?

[Malthus]

Sure there is.

To my mind, racism (and more generally, bigotry) is an enemy of civil society - or at least, more correctly, an attitude that leads to the creation of enemies of civil society.

The old saying is that, if you wish to defeat an enemy, you must understand them.

The point of an exercise like this is not specific to the Nazis and Jews. Rather, they stand as simply an example (albeit an extreme one) of how shabby ideological thinking, unexamined and unchallenged, relying on emotion and prejudice rather than logic or fact, in an atmosphere of chrisis, hysteria and false patriotism,  can lead to horrific public consequences.

Nothing could better insulate children from being victimised in turn by such a process than being asked to think through how to manipulate the levers of rhetoric themselves, based on a historical example.

The fear is not that the kids are ever likely to want to recreate Nazism and its rage against te Jews - lets face it, that is about as likely in America as the kids wanting to recreate Tsarist Russia. Rather, the the notion is to understand how rhetoric and propaganda work generally to justify what is on its face unjustifiable.

And again I think you can do this without asking children to defend racism.

Certainly one can. But I don't see why one must. Using controversy to generate interest is not inherently a bad thing.

The modern notion of shying away from anything that hints of controversy (or violence), or that may possibly upset anyone, strikes me as designed to produce the sort of bland, boring versions of history and rhetoric under which I suffered as a high school student.

I stated it before but now I'll ask it - did most of Languish have to complete a similar assignment?

We did one much less controversial (and, admittedly, less interesting) - to take a position from Canadian history and support it (I got the Family Compact, a group of colonial grandees that effectively ruled Upper Canada with patronage and corruption).

I'd much rather have "done" the Nazis.